


Of Happier Times

by grammarpolice



Category: Prodigal Son (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst, Blood, Blood and Gore, Blood and Injury, Brother-Sister Relationships, Character Death, Childhood Memories, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, MALCOLM DOESN'T DIE, Malcolm Bright Needs a Hug, Memories, Men Crying, Minor Character Death, Stabbing, Survivor Guilt, emotional breakdown, s1 e7
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:14:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21923491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grammarpolice/pseuds/grammarpolice
Summary: He’s never suffocated before, but his lungs are being strangled like a hand is compressing them between meaty fingers, kneading them like dough, winding fishing wire around them and constricting them until they shatter, crumble, detonate, and he can’t quite breathe past the sensation.
Relationships: Gil Arroyo & Malcolm Bright, Malcolm Bright & Ainsley Whitly, Malcolm Bright & Dani Powell, Malcolm Bright & JT Tarmel
Comments: 20
Kudos: 66





	Of Happier Times

She’s no heavier in his arms than when she was eight, all skin and bones and wiry limbs that dug into his chest when she fell asleep against him during weekly marathons of Scooby-Doo or Spongebob Square Pants or Disney movies with singing fish and renditions of fairy tales of happier times. He looks to her face, which, even now, is placid, gentle, naive in the way she frames her features. If it weren’t for the coarseness of her eyes, the blue calloused and raw and all too damaged, the thought that she’s encountered so much evil—pulsates with the blood of someone so vile—would be almost incredulous.

The fabric between them is swollen with blood. It’s hot and thick and metallic, and he bites down on his tongue so hard that it too oozes from his own mouth. He wishes it was all his, that he could take her place, that she was tucked away safe beneath a blanket watching reruns of Looney Tunes with a bucket of popcorn in one hand and their old puppy in another, but instead she’s cradled in his arms, flesh pale and cold and all too wrong, blood draining from her chest as the blade nestled between her muscle tissue twists and contorts inside her with each step he takes.

He’s never suffocated before, but his lungs are being strangled like a hand is compressing them between meaty fingers, kneading them like dough, winding fishing wire around them and constricting them until they shatter, crumble, detonate, and he can’t quite breathe past the sensation. It crawls and it slithers inside his chest, wraps around muscles and veins and bones and organs, and he wants to scream a raw, cathartic scream, but the scene ahead is tilting, fading like a dying person’s pulse—like Ainsley’s pulse— and he can barely clamber through the desolate hallways as is.

“Keep talking to me, Ains. Keep talking,” he says.

He thinks he says.

He can’t feel anything over the weight of the anvil buried deep in his gut. His heart writhes against his ribcage, a child mourning the relics of movie nights and imaginary games and ghost stories that are now and forever unattainable.

“Please, please keep talking. Keep talking.”

He remembers the way she used to hover at his door frame on thunderstruck nights until he waved her over, let her crawl beneath the sheets next to him, wrapped his arm around her shoulders while she slept so that he could protect her. He remembers when their father was taken away, arms strung behind his back with handcuffs that rubbed his skin a frayed red, and he wiped her tears with his own shaking palms and whispered that—

“It’s okay. Everything's gonna be okay. You’re okay.”

—even though he didn’t even begin to believe it himself. He held her after her first boyfriend dumped her on the night of prom, he held her hand so tight his fingers ached to the core of their bones at their grandmother’s funeral, he carried her to bed when she fell asleep on the couch, he spoiled her and put bandaids on her wounds and stopped her tears with laughter, and yet when she needed him most, when there was a psychotic narcissist brandishing a knife at her, wielding a blade into her chest, he didn’t protect her. He was too far away. He wasn’t fast enough to save her. He shouted and he ran and he dove to the stark tile floor with a thud but it wasn’t enough. He wasn’t enough.

“I’m sorry, Ains. I’m so fucking sorry,” he whispers. His eyes are heavy, swollen with culpability and self-loathe and the gut-twisting revelation of helplessness, of drowning and of failure, and he’s shaking so hard, his chest so shattered and smothered, and the world so detached and far away, that he can’t even tell if he’s fucking sobbing.

“I wish it was me,” he says. “I wish it was me. It deserves to be me.” Then he looks at her face, studies her calloused blue eyes, he naive but pain twisted expression, and whispers, so choked and so raw and so unlike him that he almost doesn’t think it’s his tongue the words slip from, “I wish it was anybody but you.”

He wants to say more. Wants to tell her a thousand times over that he loves her, that he needs her, that she’s the most important thing to him, that he’s nothing without her, that he deserves to be dead and she deserves to live, that he’s so fucking sorry, he’s so, so, so fucking sorry, but it doesn’t matter if he says anything at all.

She was dead on impact.

She was dead the moment Tevin thrusted the blade into her heart.

She was dead the moment Doctor Martin Whitly, The Surgeon, the man who murdered twenty-three women without a drop of remorse, crumpled to his knees and screamed with a palpability of regret so strong it suffocated the room.

She was dead the moment Jin wailed, clutched his head so tight that Malcolm thought his skull would crack.

She was dead the moment Malcolm caught her, the moment he shrieked her name with the tatters of his abused throat, the moment her blood permeated her designer dress, the floor beneath them, Malcolm’s flesh, his thousand-dollar suit, his face when he pressed his cheek to her chest in a last attempt to deny something he already knew.

The sun was bright as he pushed open the doors with bruised and bloody shoulders weighed down by Ainsley.

She’s dead the moment the smear of red and blue lights contorts into firetrucks and police cars and ambulances.

She’s dead the moment paramedics run toward them with stretchers and bags of medical supplies and a disassociated expression on their faces.

She’s dead the moment Gil and Dani and JT are quick behind them, sprinting, pushing themselves to get to them faster like that change anything.

She’s dead the moment his body gives out and they fall to the ground.

He wraps his arms around her, buries his face in the saturated fabric of her dress, smells the pungent odor of metal, of death and of her perfume, lets her blood cling to his cheek. He breathes her in, out, through his constricting airways, blackening vision, floundering sensation of impotency and detachment and agony.

There’s pressure against his torso, pulling him upward, away from her, away from his little sister, and he clutches her tighter, pulls her into him, thrashes with his body against the opposing force.

“No, no!” he shouts.

“Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm, listen to me! Listen!” someone shouts.

There’s more pressure, more hands digging into his side, his ribs, pulling him up from the fabric of his shirt, but he can’t let go of her, can’t leave her, he has to protect her.

“Kid—”

“No!” They don’t understand. They don’t understand that he can’t leave her again, that he needs her, that it’s his fault and he’s the one that should be dead. “Get off! I can’t leave her! No! Please, please, Ainsley! Please!”

He can feel his throat tear. He can feel his body spasm and contracts with sobs. He can feel Gil’s arms envelope around his chest, pull him up, away.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Gil says, but it sounds more like running water in Malcolm’s ears, like he’s trapped just beneath the surface of reality, like he’s falling and falling and falling down a tunnel, a wormhole, away from the paramedics and Gil and Dani and JT and Ainsley and himself, and he almost wishes it to be true.

He goes through the ebb and flow of motions; Gil dragging him up, restraining him, the paramedics closing in around Ainsley.

“Don’t touch her!” he shouts, and he feels himself collapse to the floor. “Don’t—p-please… please. I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so fucking sorry.” He repeats it like a mantra, like it’s the only grasp he has left on his life, and in a way it is.

“Shhhhh,” Gil whispers. He still has his arms wrapped around Malcolm’s torso, holding him up, cradling him as sobs wrack the latter’s body.

“She’s dead, Gil,” he chokes. “She’s dead, she’s dead.”

“Shhhh, hey, shh. Breathe.”

He hiccups, inhale catching on the knot in his throat, and his head lightens like air deflating from a balloon. J.T. and Dani crouch in front of him, obstructing his view of Ainsley. His eyes are too blurry and too heavy to make out their expression, his mind too exhausted to care. “I need her! I need her! It should've been me. I need her!” he shouts, because they don’t understand.

Someone grabs hold of his hands, squeezes them, intertwines their fingers with his.

“You gotta breathe. Breathe with me,” says Dani. She moves her hands, his in tow, and places his palm on her chest. “Breathe with me. In, out.”

In, out.

He remembers when Ainsley was nine and he was eleven and they built a fort in the den and slept in it for a week.

In, out.

He remembers when they gorged on Oreos and birthday cake the year after their father was arrested and no one showed up to Malcolm’s party.

In, out.

He remembers her smile on Christmas mornings. 

In, out.

In, out.

In, out.

He remembers happier times of tree houses and late-night talks and monsters in the dark and trick-or-treating and movies by the fire, of shared secrets and exchanged stories and beach days by the ocean. 

He remembers everything she was and everything he's not. 

But now she's dead and he's nothing.

**Author's Note:**

> well, sorry. 
> 
> consider this my christmas gift (strange gift, huh?) 
> 
> i’ve always toyed around with what would happen if ainsely or jessica were to die (which, as much as i love them, i want to see because i feel like it would push malcolm to the breaking point)
> 
> i based this off of that one scene in harry potter where he’s clutching *spoilers* cedric’s body. i’m not sure if i probably executed that image but i hope you get the picture 
> 
> thanks for reading!


End file.
